outgoing mail: billions & billions of stars

Space may be the place, but the sold-individually decorative paper section at a certain major craft store (that will remain anonymous as I still refuse to provide free marketing for chain retailers on my little-read, niche blog) is currently also “the place.” I don’t know when their paper design department upgraded from stripes and polka dots to sky-maps and painted galaxies, but I am not complaining. And neither, I hope, will my pen pals when they receive these envelopes!

(If you want to know how to sing the title of this blog post, check out my #1 jam as a highschooler: one of Symphony of Science’s quality musical remixes of quotes from various “great minds of science.” I think Bill Nye was responsible for this title-worthy phrase!)

It’s strange to use actual craft paper intended for crafting to create my envelopes after my recent love affair with recycled book and magazine pages. I still prefer the cost-effective and Earth-friendly alternative (I can get a book at the Goodwill for $1, enough to make an entire empire of envelopes, which is about the same cost of just one of these fancy papers), of course. Aren’t these gorgeously printed, though?

I appreciate this US map print even more so because it reminds me of a patchwork quilt.

The swirling colors of this gemstone print, on the other hand, remind me of my mom’s incredible marbled fabric!

I wanted to break my standard envelope mold and see if the postal service would accept one that is shaped like a parallelogram! (Or am I just incapable of folding a rectangle? It can be two things.)

When I finished this set of envelopes, I promised myself I wouldn’t start using them until I’d photographed their pristine state for a blog post – and then for some reason I started writing Emma’s address label anyway before I even realized what I was doing? I guess I really wanted to stake her claim on that cool galactic oil painting! The intended recipients of each of the other three envelopes, luckily, can remain a mystery.